


Wise Father

by archea2



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternative Perspective, Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Taking a trope and upending it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-22 08:11:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7426987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a corner of Lestrade’s heart, there's a die-hard child. Greg hates it more than anything in the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wise Father

**Author's Note:**

> Written a long time ago as a mirror fic to "Wise Child", planned before S3, so the reunion scene between Greg and Sherlock goes a bit different here.
> 
> Gen, no daddy kink.

_It is a wise father that knows his own child._

William Shakespeare

 

1976\. Greg (round-cheeked, round-eyed, with a knack for standing in the flight path of projectiles that will serve him well in his soccer years, but they're yet to come) sacrifices to the family sofa.

Greg is seven years old. The sofa is Uncle K’s one-man lair, the only presence in the room that can ground him out of harm’s way, night in, night out, until the room fills with telly gloom and Greg’s eyes can’t tell one bulky, leather-padded form from the other. By eleven, Uncle K is out, spreadeagled on the sofa, one foot to the ground and the other hooked over the sofa's back: Greg can tiptoe safely to their kitchen fridge.

If the sofa is not a household god, then what is?

 _Take him for good_ , Greg tells his god, pushing his favourite comic book between the thick, inflexible cushions. _Please, I’ll do anything. Just, just. Take him and bring my real dad back from away_.

When the sofa keeps silent, Greg clutches Uncle K’s lighter in his fist and takes a silent farewell of _Batman: The Brave and the Bold_.

Gods, of course, are two-sided. This one summons Uncle K in time to preclude disaster and then sends him away, with roars of _psychotic little sod_. But the sofa stays, and the next uncle decides Greg is old enoughto lie down on it, his belly to the stiff cold vinyl and his fist to his mouth, when he steps out of line.

 

* * *

 In a corner of Lestrade’s heart, there's a die-hard child. Greg hates it more than anything in the world.

Any other kid in distress, he’ll care for. Work his team into a steam and a rag until there’s a soft crewcut to pat better, a pair of blue or black eyes puddled with fear that can be told they’re _safe, it’s over, son, your folks are on their way here_. In the best-case scenarios, that is. The not-so-best have their hour, and he hates them too, not just for the grit of defeat, but because defeat strikes a match right inside that heart’s corner of his, and he hates it. Hates it when the light falls upon the ghost child who opens his round eyes and whimpers hopefully. 

 _Go back to sleep_ , Lestrade tells the child. _No one’s coming for you_.

He never brings a blanket, though it’s cold enough that his lips go numb on _you_. Instead, he tugs on the blue-and-white tape, inspects the seals on the door. Nailed to the door is a golden ring, bit worn out, matching the ring that has begun to thin out on his fourth finger. His Nan was buried in her wedding ring, asked to in her last breath, or so his mother said. Hopefully, with the years going, the ring will do the trick and the child will die out. 

 

* * *

 

 _Because you need me_ , Sherlock says, flashing him a cautionary glance once he’s closed the door on Anderson and the rest of Lestrade’s team, and Lestrade stands still.

They’ve known each other for five years. In a few hours, Lestrade will be telling John he doesn’t, really. Know Sherlock. Not telling John is that it’s no big deal long as Sherlock knows him. That he’s welcome to look down on him, any time, any road, if he can look all the way down to the child-shaped grief in Lestrade, and then look into Lestrade’s eyes and convey that he’s here for him.

 _Yes_ , Lestrade answers, and on another, farther plane of being, lets his lungs stock in the brisk autumn air; hears his own sigh of relief at the crisp sound of Sherlock’s steps past the cordoned-off area, past the door, into the forbidden area. _God help me, I do_.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, when he’s riding a cab in the small hours and the day is still late on schedule, trailing all the messy night noises, he tries to picture his team’s response if he told them the truth about him and Sherlock.

Snickers. _No way, guv_. Fake retch. _Next-level fucked up_. Either way it wouldn't be pleasant: no one likes to see their faith upended, and so Greg takes the road more travelled and leaves them to their easy belief. John, Mrs Hudson, his brethren at work - they've all cast him as Sherlock's elder in age and rank. The greying mentor, father to his men, only man on the Force to make the footloose genius toe the line.

They should know better. No, really. What's that saying again, that Miss Fabian was so fond of? Ah, yes. They have eyes and they do not see. More to the point, they have ears and they do not hear.

_I’ll be right behind._

_Thank you._

No one came for the child when Greg was packed into a room with two younger brothers and told to mind them or else, and by the time his family had gone and outgrown him, there were others to mind. Before he knew, he was D. I. Dad, a tireless Solomon to his team’s tussles and claims, yelling at them, rationing out frowns and brownie points, being there to their hearts' content.

And all the time, the child's pulse knocked at his heart. The thin ring was too heavy. He played his role, yes, but home performance was another story. At home was Lisa, his thirty-something wife, who wanted to look up to him and be made to feel young; to feel his love and care swathed around her like the soft empty cocoons of late summer; while all he wanted was to push his face between her breasts and lap at their soft wealth with small whimpers of ease.

Too thin, too heavy. She spoke of their years not getting any younger, of a child that would bring them closer, and he knew she was really pleading for him to act his age. And he tried. Christ, did he try. Their bed, his safe space in younger years, him tucked into her warm flank, their bed became a stage. And the performances grew shorter and shorter, fumbling, a freak act, until he found he couldn't even give her that.

Days not to remember. Dark pulse days, when no amount of work and will could hush the fucking child to peace, and he taking to drink in the end. Furtive, like, painkiller at the end of day, beer with the team, hip flask paraded at the bowling-club. Then less furtive, avid, lips sucking at the bottleneck in a gush of self-hatred (like a fucking _pacifier_ ), waiting for Lisa to say the D-word.

At some point in these days, he met with Sherlock.

 

* * *

 

The relief would come later, in hindsight that their first encounter had shown him under his true colors. It was easy to think of it as an anniversary because of the date, the fifth of November (remember, remember) and its compacted irony – the kids next street lighting their bangers while he barked out orders, until their puny flares of sound became a counterpoint to his and the derision of it washed over him. It was no use; nothing he said would make it clear to DC Hopkins, looking up at him with zealous adoration, why a young Jane Doe lay in that skip, the content of a nearby bin strewn in a careful parody of a chalk outline around her corpse.

But this was Hopkins's maiden trip and Lestrade, hating to disappoint him, mustered his voice again. 

"We're done, I think. Still, better ask the neighbours again if they saw anyone —"

" — or, more to the point, heard anything. You're in Battersea, Detective Inspector, home to the highest feral cat density in London. Any scene of this kind is bound to draw them in. If the neighbours recall any caterwauling, you'll get at least a decent estimation of the hour of death. As for the lurid _mise en scène_ — "

And so it began - the voice, with its loaded lower tones, taking him by the hand and holding tight as it led him with phosphorescent certainty out of the dark nook. Lestrade didn’t even think of protesting. He stood next to Hopkins in shared epiphany and a touch of pride that the tall stranger only looked at him as he spoke. Months later, facing his bathroom mirror under a flicker of neon, his face ill-shaven and shadowed into the dark side of sleepless, he would ask himself how much he had given away that first time.

Mrs Hudson had a clue for him. "Such _round_ eyes," he overheard her coo to John once, while he was fetching his coat. "As if he was, you know, wide-eyed and trusting all the time. It's a wonder they don't take more advantage of him. But then, he's such a natural leader." 

Lestrade, who knew wisdom when he heard it, bought a pair of sunglasses. An asset, though tricky to manage in the late hours.

 

* * *

 

Sherlock came back with more answers, more tips as to methods and results, and Lestrade found himself craving them as they blossomed into a constant. To his team, Sherlock was a boor and a bore; a free electron, buzzing with negative charge and unwelcome in their force field. But Greg could feel how Sherlock became more nuanced when addressing him - quieter, less dismissive, more watchful with every occasion. Even his barbed quips, never spoken in his team’s presence, weren't so much taunts as an oblique invitation to let Sherlock shoulder a burden he was better geared to carry. So that

 _You're thinking. It's annoying_.

was really Sherlock’s AIO, his signal for _Give yourself a break, you’re doing fine as things are, no one can push past their natural limits, you will learn in time and get better at this_. 

And get better Lestrade did, until Sherlock made it known that he would only come now for the hard'uns. He delivered this smiling; a quiet smile, lobbed at the Met pedestrians who would glimpse their shadows as they passed the office and its glass door – Greg straightbacked, arms crossed, chin salient; Sherlock slumped on a chair, arms hanging at his side - and misread them. Lestrade looked down at Sherlock and gave his own private smile, half cheeky, half diffident.

"I'll do that." 

"Good. You won't need me, most of the time. When you do... you know where to find me."

Lestrade came to the door to watch him stroll down the corridor: his own man, walking by himself because all places were alike to him. But where the corridor branched out, before the outside world began, there Sherlock turned and winked at him. Lestrade felt a rush of blood in his chest that wasn't adult love, yet was love, a bright rush of thanksgiving, and went back to his paperwork with a new vim.

The fifth year rolled on, its fifth of November bringing new crimes and one John Watson, a poisoned birthday pressie. Once the poison abated, Greg felt bad enough to try and explain ("Thought you'd, ah. Taken my place, kinda"), much to John's confusion since he, like every denizen of the Sherlock nebula, stood firm in his belief that Lestrade was to Sherlock what Mycroft Holmes failed to be - friend, handler, provider, occasional Santa and silver lodestar. 

Lestrade resigned himself to John not getting it and not absolving him, although the memory of that day rankled. Him walking into Sherlock's new flat to find another little man settled there, another _vulnerable_ little man being fussed about to the best of Sherlock's fussing capacity. For hadn’t Sherlock told the little man to make himself comfortable? Too right. And have a warm cuppa (yes, Greg had lingered on the stairs). And then, to crown it all, Sherlock had carried the little man all the way to the scene and made _him_ the wizard’s apprentice, right under Lestrade’s nose.

It stung, betrayal-sharp. Like Peter Pan in that book his nieces always had him read aloud when he stayed over at Dan's for the week-end. Or those black-and-white flicks starring David Niven as the boring son, the good son, shoved aside to make room for some dashing imposter. But who is he? Lestrade asked repeatedly ( _Tell me he doesn’t count_ ) and all Sherlock had said was, _He's with me_. Like that. Oh, the slap of these words, scalding Greg with hot resentment. So Sherlock no longer played the game? Sherlock had found a replacement for him? Fine. Let them trade places, see if he cared. And then he'd recalled Sherlock's confidence about the drugs, not so long ago, when Greg had whispered that even now, even though _sober_ was the ticket, he couldn't be sure there wouldn't be a time... 

The shame still branded his cheeks when he thought back to that drugs bust. An eye for an eye, it had been; my hurt for yours. Look at me, sat in your chair, lording it about. Telling him _you_ are the child. Telling him about the drugs. Of course Sherlock was clean; and he, of course, had turned the tables on Greg, flicking off Greg’s tantrum with a shrug before he went and boxed his case for him. Leaving John and Greg to figure it out together and gang up to "save" him – if you could call it that. It had been, hmmm. Educational? It had been the beginning of a beautiful friendship, even though he'd never man up enough to tell John the whole truth.

There had been ups and downs. Things with Lisa – not an up. Now that he was on the mend, he’d really thought he would focus on becoming that ideal husband and give her what she wanted. Sadly, Sherlock had thought the plan delusional. "Why would you change yourself into something you're not?" he'd griped, his voice resonating with unmistakable force in the whorls and twists of Lestrade's brains. Lestrade knew he was being scolded: this was the brightest lesson of all, brighter than all of Sherlock’s deductions set head to tail. "There are plenty of women who'd take you without a patent to breed, especially as she's not interested in the child, only in what she thinks is the making of a strong man. Her thoughts are even duller than yours at this instant."

Lestrade had huffed and puffed, but when Christmas turned up and Sherlock outed the PE Teacher, all he could feel was relief: pure, giddying, as as if he'd been pumped full of high-flow oxygen. Glorious, glorious relief, that had John hover besides him in concern. 

"You good? Jesus, Sherlock is really —" 

"Yeah," Greg said fervently.

"Christ, Greg, I’m sorry. Biggest prat that ever pratted… look, I don’t mean to pry, only you’ve had that, er, that bizarro smile all night long. Are you quite — ?"

"Quite," Greg said, and made a mental note to text his thanks to Sherlock come New Year, once he'd sorted out the Dorset mess.

 

* * *

 

Back home, back in times when Lestrade was still Greg to his entourage, his Sunday school teacher (a spinster martinet who’d marked him down as her pet black sheep the moment she’d gazed deep into his eyes and spotted a natural crier) had told them about Providence. 

Providencccce – Miss Fabian had a knack for hissing out the blandest words – was God’s protective love working in inscrutable ways, and the justice of it not to be scanned by the shallow eye of mankind, whereas hers had already sighted Greg’s _Batman_ comics, wedged between his thighs.

The back-and-forth slap that followed was Pavlovian enough to impress the belief that Providence was tall, dark, a dab hand in dramatic entrances and sassy comebacks, that he worked in mysterious ways and came with a gnomic sidekick. 

All of which must have stuck long after Miss Fabian joined the tribe of his childhood bogeys, because Providence became Sherlock, as inscrutable as his given name. Sherlock, who never showed any explicit fondness for Lestrade. Never came to the pub with him, never showed up at his amateur footie or his carol society concerts. But there were other ways, other oblique signs. Sherlock nicking his police badge was, Lestrade knew, Sherlock’s warning to him to drop the public image for a while. Greg usually complied, texting Sherlock a furtive photograph of a pub ensign, or muddy sneakers, or the brand new telly in his bachelor flat lit to a National Wildlife program.

Once, and only once, did he rebel. The divorce papers had just landed with a limp woosh inside his mailbox; Sherlock signaled that Greg was to take a long vacation out of London. Mid-vacation, however, Greg got bored and decided that what he really wanted to be was with Sherlock and John on their hunting ground du jour. He missed his Providence, and it was way more fun to race a hellhound like on _Supernatural_ than to cycle alone through the Lake District. 

Sherlock, understandably, didn’t appreciate his dodging vacation time. Retribution was swift to follow - not with a slap or sofa time, but with Sherlock withholding Greg’s first-name privilege. Still, he was quick to relent; went so far as to offer Greg an impromptu alibi at his bro’s expense and let him have his Boy’s Own Adventure, with lots of Devon ale and ganking the monster. It was glorious fun but too short, and Lestrade didn’t blame John for looking a bit sour during their return journey.

He leant forward to tip John, sitting across him in the coach, a brotherly pat on the knee. As he straightened, he caught a quick view of Sherlock looming in the corridor and watching him through the glass partition. Sherlock’s face morphed back into its aloof self, but not before Greg had had a glimpse of – no, no, it couldn’t be fear, couldn’t be sadness. It had to be worry, and Greg smiled at him because the monster was dead and life had never been so good, but Sherlock didn’t smile, not even when John got up and said that he was off to the dining car, and not to wait for him if the girl next car felt like a decaf – a _sugar-free_ decaf.

"Look," Greg said, wondering if Sherlock still felt angry at his own dramatic entrance, "I’m sorry I didn’t –"

But Sherlock went to sit besides him and said "It’s all right", making everything good again, despite the soft-edged sadness in his words. It would be seven months before he heard them again, spoken in Sherlock’s flat, and they would not address him this time because nothing was all right, not for him, not ever again in this life.

 

* * *

 

A lie can catch up with a man, not because it fools him, but because it scares the man stock-still.

"It was the kids," he whispers to Molly Hooper in the blue gloom of his kitchen, a first of April of all dates. "The Bruhl kids. They – they clinched it. Sort of." Not that he’d believed Donovan and Anderson when they’d crept up to him with cautionary tales about Sherlock Holmes. _He_ did the cautioning in this house, thank you very much. 

But tonight’s tale featured Sherlock taking two little children under his coattails and hiding them in a dark, lonely place, the better to feed them poisoned sweets. Fi fa fo fum, and throw in that Semtex kid for good measure, tolling his own death on the count of ten while Sherlock had pirouetted and laughed – _we saw the tapes, sir, heard him chapter and verse, even you can’t deny it_.

Could he? Much as he wanted to scoff at their cardboard ogre, he couldn’t. Thing was, the ogre struck too close home. It felt as if they had broken into Lestrade’s heart of hearts and found the image of Sherlock he hoarded there. And now they were showing him the same picture, every line intact, in its dark negative – superimposed on all the dead uncles. Lestrade knew the horror was fake, couldn’t possibly be true, but how exact it was!

And because he couldn’t shake off this fear, this numbness, he’d done the predictable thing and gone to Sherlock for clarity. What he’d received was the light touch of Sherlock’s hand on his forehead, a gesture that should have felt like the mark of Cain if Sherlock had been one to follow textbook procedures, including the Book of Books. But Lestrade had known it for what it was. A final lesson, and a pass, and the closest thing to a caress in their skillful code of subtext. But it hadn’t shielded Greg from the rest of the night, which had unfolded with its own perverse logic – from his trip to the CS for a public scolding and a forced march back to Baker Street to Sherlock protecting him to the last, waiting until the arrest had been made to run away, followed by Greg’s misguided effort to help him by keeping the posse well away from St Bart’s, Sherlock’s stand-in home.

A dark pulse night, this. Stretching out into a hard night’s day, before they released him, a suspect all but in name. Then back to his flat and the empty lap of his couch. He’d thought, even in the lift, that if he grabbed the glass with his eyes closed, perhaps it would let him into the fall, down and down and down, every sensation tapering off to the hard coldness in his hands until – it gave to the warm press of hands over his, gently prising the glass away, one finger at a time. "Oh, no. Oh, really, don’t. Please, Mr Lestrade – Greg. He, he wouldn’t want you to do that." 

Later on, while she makes a brave show of cooking an omelette from the two eggs and sip of milk in his fridge, he asked Molly, "But how did you get in?" She makes a hurried noise and gives him a bretzel to steady his stomach. Must have left the door ajar, then; not a first, and it had been a sad tumble from lift to couch. 

"Will you stay?" he asks still later, adding quickly "I don’t mean, stay for – heck, I couldn’t lift a sodding _finger_ –", but already he is being wrapped in a plaid he doesn't recall owning and led back to the couch.

Sleep is a windy course, but when it lets go of him in the early hours, there she is, buttoning up her coat and saying "I’ll be back". The room looks its clear, sober self; still looks as if Sherlock didn’t die and took all the light with him.

 

* * *

 

The Super says he is on compassionate leave, end-date pending HR evaluation and intradepartmental resource allocation. Lestrade calls it house arrest, wham, bam, thank you Ma’am.

Fourteen days past the Fall, ten after the burial he’s dodged, and Molly is taking him to the Hope and Anchor to eat peas and a jacket potato with mince. Perhaps it’s the carb orgy, or the tang of Spring in the air, shooing them from Camden to Crowndale in one continuous breeze, but Lestrade feels a sudden anger waking his guts. There’s only so much of the child can be called up in him, and one man only entitled to do that because, serial infuriater as he was, he never abused his given right. If the top brass think Lestrade whipping-boy material, they have another think coming. 

"So turn it into a break," Molly says. "As in, you know, breaking _from_ them."

"I — yeah, no, they don’t work like that." He sets down his glass heavily (bitter – no pun intended, just his Old Reliable). "Didn’t. My breaks."

His badge is still where he left it, in the inside pocket of his second-worst jacket, the one he meant to dump at the cleaner’s because the lining is getting frayed. Lestrade shoved it there an instant before he jogged up Barts’s endless stairs, panting from start to finish, Donovan stalled at ground level. 

"Well, how do they work? What would you be doing, right now, if you were having one?"

Lestrade stares down at the gleaming wood between their plates. "Takin’ a pic of the peas, I guess. And the beer." His lips twitch of their own accord. "And you across the table, just to see if he’d jump to the wrong premises." 

Of course he has to explain about the pic-texting business, but it goes quite smoothly, because Molly makes speaking child’s play. Better than anyone in his sparse circle of friends, even better than John with his crinkly smile and his sailor’s mouth. They bask in the smell of malt, potato and candlelight, and he tells her about his underhand way of letting Sherlock know he’s on the right side of happy. 

"Of holidays," he says.

She bites her lip, bending over her plate as she uses her fork to show a few stranded peas the error of their ways. Watching her, he wonders if he’s gone too far; taken pity for comfort, and X-rayed a part of himself too embarrassing to look at, even for a qualified anatomist. Hell, now he needs to change the subject. But she looks up and smiles, and speaks in the clear flustered way he knows is her own brand of pluck. 

"I think you should keep on doing it."

"What, text a dead man pics of peas? Like _he_ ’d bother with food in the afterlife. If there’s any, considering – " 

"Oh yes. Oh, I think there is, I do. I do believe. But then I would, Greg – I do postmortems, remember?" She blinks at his incredulous stare. "Oops."

And the next instant has them laughing, insanely, shamelessly and so hard his eyes tear up – her face, flushed and eager, her pony-tail, the wooden corner they sit in, all melting into a pool of darkgoldbrown. His first real  laugh since Sherlock’s death; the first he’s heard from her ever since he’s known her. Release laced with grief, but it feels like a good pain.

"Oh, oh. Oh _my_. I’m so, so sorry, Greg, I don’t know what came over me. Was that very improper?"

"Shhh. Sweet mother of God. Peas and postmortems. You know what? Sod proper. Betcha he’d be laughing with us if he were here." Almost without volition, he’s fished out his mobile, put on the camera option and held it over his plate. "You’re all nicked, buddies: we need ourselves a souvenir."

"When my father died," Molly says later, mouthing round pudding, "I was living with him. Days after his death, I would go to the bathroom and write on the mirror. Because, you see, when I was young and he shaved first thing in the morning, I used to come and watch. Loved to see his face come out of the white, the soap, sort of like a birth. Like the white brought out the good in him" – she smiled - "and because it was our moment. I’m not good with words, well, you’ve heard me, Greg, you know how I am. But we had this thing, this agreement, that I could dip into the soap and write on the glass." 

"Write?" 

"Write a number – between one and nine." She takes a quiet breath. "To let him know how I felt. Three, seven and nine? They were good. Two and four, so-so. Six was the worst, and so he’d dip into the soap himself and turn it into something fun, a cat, a treble clef, a kind old man with a big belly. Something new every time, even when he had to think first and it made him late." 

"Why was six the bad guy?"

"I…don’t know? Maybe it got mixed up with sick in my head. Oh, well. He made me do it, my dad, even when he was stuck in bed last thing in his life and the nurse had to give him sponge baths. I used toothpaste and my compact mirror. I still do, now and then. Oh, he was so alive, my father. I do the drawings, too."

She stops talking. This ought to be a sad story but isn’t, perhaps because she herself is so alive, so much more than the goody-two-left-shoes he took her for. Now he takes her hand and watches her breath catch up, lifted from her heart, and warm the air between them. It kindles the trust he needs for his own words, whispered to the daughter she’s been and the friend she has become. 

"Molly, it still wouldn’t work. Because I, I have his phone with me. It would be – like – texting myself."

She doesn’t move. Doesn’t even look surprised and thus, made bold and brave, he carries on under the pub’s lazy-warm rumble, telling how he picked up the phone in that restless, agonizing minute he spent on Barts’s roof with another dead man. Knowing that Sherlock was no more, knowing that Gregory Lestrade was a suspect in the making and that theft of evidence would add insult to perjury, but unable to bear the thought of Sherlock’s phone, its casing still wam against his palm, being bagged and locked away in the Property Room. Batman had his Bat-signal, God his prophets, visionary dreams and go-between angels. Sherlock Holmes had his i-Phone.

"So give it to me."

Molly’s voice rings with a strange urgency. He frowns.

"Let me keep it for you. You won’t know where it is, but it will be safe and it will be on, all the time. I promise. And you did say they might search your flat at any notice, but they won’t bother with mine, I’m the collateral victim. Do it, Greg, do it. Please." 

He nods stiffly, squeezes her hand in return. A nearby patron shoots them a blasé glance. 

"You’ll find it a safe place?" he murmurs. 

There are actual tears in her eyes when she nods back. "The safest."

 

* * *

 

Four sherry glasses, filled to the brim, gathered on his coffee table. 

His niece in a costume she insisted was a lady queen pirate’s outfit.

Part of a fresco-sized graffiti on New Scotland Yard’s revolving doors, Sherlock’s name carved on the glass, sharply visible.

Molly stretching out on the open grass, a plover's feather stuck behind her ear.

The snapshots answer to the same Spring that, in its latter days, finds him loitering with intent in a graveyard. The graveyard is empty; Lestrade walks up to the tomb he’s come to see, only stopping while its dark monolith gleams under the sun, Sherlock’s faithful image.

He is aware, even now, that the man bowing his head before the grave is less of a child and more of a son. This is the nuance that has been stamped on him as the years grew on, marking his growth into an adulthood that owes much to his loss, now he’s seen how little it takes to shatter a strong man. Somehow, somewhere between a fall and a hard place, he has come to a sense of self. This self comes without the terror of imposture, of bungling the performance a few replies into first act. He still fails, of course, he still stammers. But the text is his now. Bent over a corpse; holding six-day old Sherlock Watson over the baptism fount; steering Anderson through rehab and Donovan through mutual forgiveness, he takes it all in, does his daily best to observe, and strains his heart to act on cue.

Perhaps Sherlock’s farewell touch did infuse him with some of his - not brains, obviously, although Lestrade’s closed cases rate is cantering ahead of the pack. Energy, then? Willpower? Or is it mere contempt for the world’s predictable bag of tricks? Lestrade had no idea. But as he looks on Sherlock’s grave in the cool of March, on some imperceptible jolt of heart, he takes out his mobile, holds it before his face and the green grass around him, and sends the picture to Sherlock. 

His old Nokia chirps almost on the rebound; Lestrade stifles a curse. This is Sunday and visiting hours, and he _did_ tell them not to page him. But emergencies come and emergency go, even on his day off. Grunting a sigh, he checks the caller’s ID –

...A key is pressed, angrily, clumsily. It’s like trying to breathe with a balled fist at the back of your throat. The fuck does Molly think she’s doing? Then the screen blooms into colour as the pixels rearrange themselves, showing him a man in a dark grey coat, the close-cropped grey hair on the nape of his neck and the slab of black marble visible over his shoulder. 

All of Lestrade’s heart gathers into a pulse point. It holds his blood on hiatus, his breath, even the hard-working circuit of his emotions. Inside the hiatus, _dead_ and _live_ slip into each other across a lifetime of meanings, and the fist uncurls slowly in Lestrade throat. 

With his next breath, he is turning around.

 

* * *

 

Sherlock’s face bears the brunt of his trials. It used to be rakishly lean, as Greg remembers it, morose and manic in turn. Now it looks gaunt, making his blue eyes stretch longer above the sharp cheekbones and their play of shadows. Sherlock looks older than his... well, it isn’t like Greg ever bothered to check, but he can hardly be more than thirty-five. Can he?

Something of his confusion must show, because another shadow glitches over Sherlock’s face, and Greg hurries to apologize.

"I’m sorry, " he said, and _sorry_ clears a way for his voice. "I’m so sorry, Sherlock, and so glad, and I missed you, we all did, why did you – why, _why_ –" 

The flow snags. Three years’ worth of clamped-down anger are rising instead, tumbling him in Sherlock’s way as his words rushed out furiously. "Why did you stay away so long? You never gave a damn, did you? Why? Were you taking it out on me? D’you know how it hurts, being left? Being left behind? D'you have any idea, you fucker?" 

"I’ve had time enough to figure it out." Sherlock is letting him tumble to where he stands, never taking his eyes off him. "Greg. It wasn't your fault."

Lestrade, Greg, is sobbing from the heart. Sherlock takes a step forward.

"It wasn’t, and I never meant to stay away so long. I can explain if –" but there it is, the pulse rising again, spilling over in the secret of Lestrade’s chest. Before he knows, he is reaching out; he is pulling Sherlock to him. 

"Missed you," he growls, and he breaks the last seal, lets the child stop his thoughts and push his face, wetly raw, against Sherlock’s chest.

Sherlock is still talking when the blood stops drumming at his ears, knotting together words like _keep you safe_ and _Molly_ and _all your messages_ as if he struggled to cocoon Greg in a net of sense. And Greg, Lestrade, knows this is the right procedure: he will answer to it in a while. But what he needs for the time being is Sherlock’s coat tucked about his body, warm with Sherlock, and Sherlock’s secure arms keeping him inside the coat, its collar pulled up and over Greg’s head. 

 _Trust him to see a shock blanket and raise it_. 

"You’re not listening to one word I’m saying, are you?" Sherlock must have given him a mock-glare down his nose, squinting in the process. "Some things never change."

A huff is the best go-to for a hoarse voice, that he remembers. "Like heck they don’t. Anderson found his first grey hair two days ago. Thought he was gonna sepuku himself with his own scalpel." He wriggles up to rest his head on Sherlock’s shoulder. It seems that at some point in their immediate past, they have both lowered themselves to the grass, Greg still leaning into Sherlock, Sherlock propped against his own tombstone. "Arsenal lost to Manchester, 2-to-1, can you believe it? Y’should have been there. Investigating. And I’ve boxed the Haddon case." 

"Of course you have." The hand passing through his hair pauses; grows heavier. "Still London’s finest." 

The grass smells of dust and the sun.

"So. Gimme?" Greg says at last, not caring if he sounds like London’s finest demanding a report or a child waiting to be enchanted. He tries to keep his eyes open. "And you’re not to skip ahead," comes as an afterthought.

Later on, they will walk past the glass doors and down the Yard’s hive of busy corridors. He will re-install Sherlock among his team, and they will watch and think of the old tale, of the the prodigal son back home at his father’s. _And they’ll all get it wrong_ , Lestrade thinks resignedly, _but there’s no way I can parse it out for them, now less than ever. Oh, well. As penances go, I’m let off lightly._  

He smiles when Sherlock’s arms tighten around him. The graveyard is empty; Greg looks at the green landscape and waits for the story to begin.


End file.
